“Not anymore,” I said, but then I ran out of patience with Kathleen, and said good-bye. That evening, Gloria called—she’d called daily since the murders—and after I’d reassured her that yes, Margo was still insisting on staying on campus, and still being very cautious, Gloria said, “You know, with all the hubbub I’d forgotten what I wanted to ask you.”
“Yes?” I was putting away groceries, leaving out ingredients for a stew. I had a bag of black beans in my hand.
“Eleanor Everest said she saw you the other day at the beach with a man.” I put down the beans. The tone in Gloria’s voice was one I’d never heard from her before: not accusing exactly, but stumped and oddly intimate, as if she were saying: Come on, you can tell me. “Someone with dark hair,” she said. “She didn’t recognize him.”
I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was deciding whether to lie, or how much.
“Was that you?” she said. “Are you not working anymore?”
“Actually, it was me,” I said. My voice was loud and unsteady. “I’m still working—I’m working more, in fact, as of this week—but I’ve been playing tennis at the Biltmore this summer”—Gloria knew this—“and after practice one day a few of us went to the beach. It was just so hot . . .”
“Who was the man?” said Gloria.
“My coach, Jack.” And then it occurred to me that the best lie was a stretching of the truth. Don’t deny, embellish. “There were—let’s see—four of us? Plus Jack. The women are wild about him, but he’s married—and so are they, to be honest.” I used a gossiping tone, as if I were as interested in the tidbit as she might be. “We’ve gone to lunch together a few times, several of us girls, and that day someone—I don’t remember who—invited Jack along. We ended up at the beach.” The story was fine, depending on when exactly I’d been spotted by Eleanor Everest: was it while we were standing at the car, closest to the road—this was most likely, I thought—or in the brief moment when we’d stood together at the shoreline, where we would have been recognizable only by people on the sand? I didn’t recall there being anyone close by. A betrayal of Dennis was a betrayal of others, of Gloria and Grady and Bette, and even Marse. I felt a little sick, lying to my mother-in-law. I felt lesser for it, and I suppose I was.
“Eleanor said you were picnicking—I thought maybe Dennis had played hooky. Maybe you should do that sometime, kidnap him from his office in the middle of the afternoon. That would be pretty, wouldn’t it? Take slacks for him so he doesn’t ruin his suit, and a nice fruit salad.”
“That would be nice,” I said. “It’s a great idea.” It was something I vowed to do, in that moment—sweep by his office in the middle of the day and abscond with him to the beach—and also in that moment, as Gloria said something about how they used to go to Key Biscayne as a family when the children were young, I heard Dennis’s key in the door, and I said, “Gloria, I’m sorry, I hate to interrupt, but Dennis is home and I just have to—”
“Go on, dear,” she said. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“Love you,” I said. I said it only every so often.
“You, too,” she said.
Dennis appeared in the kitchen doorway. His hair was wet, and I could see through the window that it had started to rain. He wiped his cheek with one hand and asked me about my day. I took his briefcase and set it down on the kitchen table, and although I really wanted to apologize for betraying him—never again, I would say, I don’t know what I was thinking—I couldn’t do that, not exactly. So instead, I said, “Do you want to fool around?” and he nodded and we went together down the hallway, past Margo’s room and the guest room that so long before I’d wanted to turn into a nursery. We went into the bedroom with its outdated furniture and the alarm clock that didn’t work very well but we’d never replaced and the clothes on the bed that I’d folded but not put away. And while we took off our clothes, I turned away from him, so he wouldn’t see that I was keeping myself from crying.
That week I joined a tennis team at the YWCA. I was matched with a doubles partner named Carolyn Baumgartner, who became a friend. Shortly afterward, I ran into Jane Brevard at the grocery store and told her about the team, and then she joined, too, and every couple of weeks she and I had lunch together after practice. She asked once if I knew that Jack wasn’t coaching at the Biltmore anymore—she might have been checking to see if we were in touch—but she didn’t say where he’d gone and though I wanted to, I didn’t ask. Carolyn and I won more than we lost, and though a few of the pounds I’d dropped crept back, tennis continued to be part of my life. Sometimes while I played I imagined Jack standing on the sidelines, watching me from behind sunglasses, calling out pointers: Don’t chase your toss! Show your shoulder on your forehand! In September, Dennis and Margo ran together in the Conch Classic 5K in Key West, and Dennis placed third in his age group. I’d had no idea, but that summer, while I’d been improving my tennis, Dennis had become a serious runner.
The Gainesville hysteria dissolved. No more bodies were found. The police arrested a disturbed teenager, but then let him go because he had an alibi. It would be a year before they charged the real killer, a Louisiana native named Danny Rolling; even then he would be arrested first for robbery, and only afterward would confess to the murders. Apartment 113 at Williamsburg Village would become a model apartment, the one management showed to prospective renters. Security alarms would be installed and extra locks added to the sliding glass doors throughout the complex. I know this because I called the management office to ask.
Margo changed dorm rooms again, this time with Janelle, who had by that time broken up with her boyfriend. She pledged Alpha Chi Omega but by the end of the semester went inactive. She brought three girlfriends home on break, and we took them all out to Stiltsville. She continued to live on campus. That year, Gloria and Grady decided to downsize, and they bought a condo and gave us their house—just gave it to us, no strings attached, nothing to pay but the property taxes. Then when we sold our home—our first home, where we’d raised Margo—we made enough to pay off Margo’s student loans and have a little left over for savings. When Gloria and Grady handed over the keys to their house, along with the paperwork transferring ownership, Gloria said to me, “You don’t get sentimental, now. You make it your own.” I stripped the wallpaper from every room. Bette, who at this point had sold her own house and was preparing to move away with Suzanne, helped me paint: butter yellow for the kitchen, chalky blue for the living room, deep red for the dining room. Still, in the months after we moved in, the house felt stolen—from Gloria, who’d left the linen closet smelling of cedar, and from Grady, whose tools still filled black silhouettes along the pegboard walls of the garage.
Eventually, their ghosts faded. Dennis let our lease expire at the marina, and we moved the boat to the slip behind the house. One night just after we’d moved in, while there were still unpacked boxes on the kitchen table, Dennis dragged me outside in my pajamas, and we opened a bottle of champagne and sat on the boat drinking it out of paper cups, looking up the lawn at the house, which was lighted and still. I half expected to see a figure moving past a window—someone like me but not exactly me, someone who lived among us quietly and didn’t notice much when we came and went, but was always there lurking when we were gone.
I saw Jack again one time, a year later. I was waiting to board an airplane to Atlanta, for my father’s funeral. Jack was with his thin, red-haired wife at the gate opposite mine, and when their plane was called, I watched as they stood and gathered their things, and Jack put out a hand so his wife could walk ahead of him. And then maybe he felt me watching him, because he turned and looked at me, and after a moment he waved a half-wave, like he wasn’t certain he should, and I smiled without waving, and he turned away. I miss you, I thought—these were the words that came to mind: I miss you. Even as I wondered how it was possible, I knew it was true.